This is so much harder than I remember
Jan. 4th, 2011 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anthimeriaEditing. It's one thing when I'm tearing a short story to bits, it's a whole other ball of wax when it comes to facing up editing a novel, even a novel that's only 45k words.
I think I did the whole giving-birth-blurred-memory thing, because I do not remember having this much trouble when I started editing The Novel. I feel like I had a plan, I went chapter-by-chapter, I tackled the new ending with something resembling poise, and now I'm staring at the ms for Skywatch going, ". . . where do I start?"
One looming problem that I noted in my initial read-through was that my antagonist doesn't show up in the rough until 30k words in (in a 45k-word story, this is a major flaw). I wracked my brain trying to figure out how to introduce him earlier--he just makes no sense in the context of Eshe's world. But I did, finally, figure it out, and in the space of about two hours yesterday fixed it. Obviously this is something I'll have to keep an eye on in later drafts, with an eye to consistency, but I solved what I thought was going to be my second-largest problem in two hours. Whoo!
Less cheering-worthy is the fact that I'm failing miserably at balancing a middlegrade story and a steampunk world. Steampunk is elaborate and fantastical and explosive, and its that very elaboratness that's conspiring against me. My struggles with a steampunk world aren't the whole problem, either--I can't figure out a good way to indicate that Skywatch takes place in the late ninteenth century. The world Below (our world) has no meaning for my characters. They don't care that it's 1882 in Victorian London--to them, it's 84 AL, and the carriages and corsets and classist social structures of the Victorian Age might as well not exist. Several of my early readers who only read the first 3 chapters thought it might take place in the future.
This is an early indication to me that this book is going to need a lot more outside input than The Novel did, especially since I didn't catch on to the setting issue until my second read-through.
I think I did the whole giving-birth-blurred-memory thing, because I do not remember having this much trouble when I started editing The Novel. I feel like I had a plan, I went chapter-by-chapter, I tackled the new ending with something resembling poise, and now I'm staring at the ms for Skywatch going, ". . . where do I start?"
One looming problem that I noted in my initial read-through was that my antagonist doesn't show up in the rough until 30k words in (in a 45k-word story, this is a major flaw). I wracked my brain trying to figure out how to introduce him earlier--he just makes no sense in the context of Eshe's world. But I did, finally, figure it out, and in the space of about two hours yesterday fixed it. Obviously this is something I'll have to keep an eye on in later drafts, with an eye to consistency, but I solved what I thought was going to be my second-largest problem in two hours. Whoo!
Less cheering-worthy is the fact that I'm failing miserably at balancing a middlegrade story and a steampunk world. Steampunk is elaborate and fantastical and explosive, and its that very elaboratness that's conspiring against me. My struggles with a steampunk world aren't the whole problem, either--I can't figure out a good way to indicate that Skywatch takes place in the late ninteenth century. The world Below (our world) has no meaning for my characters. They don't care that it's 1882 in Victorian London--to them, it's 84 AL, and the carriages and corsets and classist social structures of the Victorian Age might as well not exist. Several of my early readers who only read the first 3 chapters thought it might take place in the future.
This is an early indication to me that this book is going to need a lot more outside input than The Novel did, especially since I didn't catch on to the setting issue until my second read-through.